Chameleon Acquires Driveway and Announces Interactive Demos Offering

Buying software has changed again. Marketing sites used to be about communicating value; copy was about "benefits," and images were of happy users. But in a product-led world, this has been replaced by people wanting to see exactly what the product is and not be sold on the "benefits."

Teams are replacing graphics on their sites with more realistic product shots and scrambling to make the copy simpler and clearer. But the best way to showcase your product is... to showcase it. And that's what "Interactive Demos" offer.

They present a realistic snapshot of your product with which users can interact, with annotations highlighting key takeaways. Product, growth, and marketing teams can create these without code, empowering them to leverage the product to drive growth.

The "playbook" for PLG now includes Interactive Demos as the new standard, and the best companies are reporting significantly better results in conversion, activation, and engagement when leveraging Interactive Demos during the buyer journey.

We have first-hand experience with this: we've seen impressive conversion improvements when we've added these Demos to our home and landing pages. We even built our own hub of interactive product demos that has proved to be inspiring for other companies in this space.

Chameleon has always enabled PLG by offering no-code UX patterns (such as modals, walkthroughs, banners, cards, checklists, surveys, etc.) that can help users discover and engage with product features.

Now this is extending to users pre-signup so you can complete your PLG operationalization with a single, consistent, and holistic platform to drive results.

Chameleon expects to launch the private beta of this feature to existing customers within the next weeks. Register your interest via the Chameleon dashboard here. We expect it to be more widely available in early Q3 2024.

Our initial feature scope includes:

• Record a set of captures using the Chameleon Chrome Extension, by simply navigating your app

  • Edit (e.g., crop, zoom, etc.) and annotate (e.g., add tooltips, highlights, stickers) captures to create your "Demo" (a sequence of annotated captures)

• Embed this Demo on any marketing site, knowledge base article, etc.

• Review analytics on views and interactions

We will offer the ability to create Demos at no cost, as part of our improved Free plan (including usage of the HelpBar).

We will also offer some premium functionality as part of our Growth plan:

• Completely white-labeled Demos (no Chameleon branding)

• Account-based analytics (which "companies" are viewing)

• More seats for authoring and editing Demos

If you are a current or prospective Chameleon customer, please register your interest for Demos here.

Note that you can also launch interactive demos "in-app" via our existing integrations with Navattic, Arcade, and others. These will remain, and be supplemented with a more native way to create and launch interactive demos in-app using only Chameleon's functionality.

To accelerate our ability to offer Demos, Chameleon has acquired the interactive demos company Driveway. Driveway’s co-founder, Harrison Johnson, is joining Chameleon as Head of Product.

Driveway, backed by Gradient Ventures, Lenny Rachitsky, Scott Belsky, Josh Elman, Harry Stebbings and other great product operators and investors, tackled the problem of easily recording demos and leveraging AI to auto-populate annotations. It serves hundreds of customers, including ZoomInfo, Drift, and Sayari Analytics.

Harrison and the Driveway team have extensive experience in the market and were driven by a PLG model themselves. They will bring velocity, expertise, and vision to help Chameleon build the "PLG stack" to enable companies to drive more self-serve growth from their product UX.

Beyond the launch of this new category, Chameleon is committed to becoming the clear standout product in the Digital Adoption Platform category, and to that end, here's a sneak peek of recent and upcoming advances:

1. New “Embeddables” patterns: we know that the best onboarding and in-app campaigns feel native and incorporate patterns that are embedded within the page alongside core product components. We now offer the ability to create and position Banners and Cards in line without coding. We will continue to improve and expand this offering, including better layouts, "stacks" of Cards, and UX enhancements.

2. Improvements in Element Selection: selecting elements on the page to anchor in-app tooltips, or for conditional logic to show experiences is crucial. We are making our algorithm more sophisticated and simplifying the UI to make adjustments. We will also be listing all elements used across your experiences in a single table, and offering proactive "Alerts" if an element can no longer be identified on the page (using heuristic analysis) to help you maintain your in-app experiences.

3. New "Automations" functionality: we will be helping you tackle the "cold start problem" by allowing you to record a product workflow (e.g., creating an email campaign for MailChimp) and then replay this back for any user (e.g., for first time MailChimp users) to help them get closer to the aha moment without expending any effort or encountering any friction. We believe this will be a game-changer in onboarding new users!

4. Multi-question Microsurveys: we intentionally added a limit to our Microsurveys functionality to protect the long-term user experience and retain high response rates. However, we heard your feedback and will be offering more flexibility by allowing up to 3 questions (of any format) within any Microsurvey (over 2 "Steps"). We believe this strikes a balance between collecting more feedback and asking too much of a user. Remember, you can still string together multiple Microsurveys, but you can also ask follow-up questions at different moments in the user journey using targeting.

5. Other significant enhancements to Chameleon's core offering include: creating custom events (using event properties/attributes) for use in targeting or conversion tracking; real-time Amplitude cohort sync integration (update: just shipped this week!); improved HubSpot integration; easier to use "Debugger"; test as any end-user; easier to target selectors when adding custom CSS and much more!

You can always follow along with what's new at Chameleon via our release notes or by following me (Pulkit, co-founder & CEO) on LinkedIn.

To get first access to Chameleon's "Demos" product, please indicate interest here (you will need to sign-up for a free account or login to your existing one).

If you have questions or thoughts to share, please join Chameleon co-founder and CEO Pulkit Agrawal and Driveway co-founder and CEO Harrison Johnson for a special webinar. They will discuss the integration and field questions about the future of Demos, the PLG stack, our product roadmap, and more!

📅 Register for this Q&A session here 📅